What is Nvivo
NVivo key terms:
- Sources are your research materials including documents, PDFs, datasets, audio, video, pictures, memos and framework matrices.
- Coding is the process of gathering material by topic, theme or case. For example, selectin a paragraph about water quality and coding it at the node ‘water quality’.
- Nodes are containers for your coding—they let you gather related material in one place so that you can look for emerging patterns and ideas.
- Source classifications let you record information about your sources—for example, bibliographical data.
- Node classifications allow to you record information about people, places or other cases for example, demographic data about people.
Getting Started Guide
Task
(bolded topics are most important)
- Read getting started guide to get basic knowledge (16-44)
- Open Nvivo and open help tool (question mark, upper-right corner). Explore topics carefully.
- Open Sample Project in Nvivo
- Sources pane (left side of the UI)
- Explore interviews -folder (check especially video interview to see how video and transcription are synced)
- Look into Area and township -folder. Images can be used as sources also. Try to code image (draw rectangular to image and click right button)
- Check Social Media and survey folders in order to get picture that web sites and questionnaires can be used also as sources
- IMPORT document to Nvivo
- Nodes pane
- Click economy node. List of references (node content) in sources will be generated. Explore it to see which sources include "economy node"
- Go to VIew tab (top of the screen)
- turn stripes on
- turn highlights on
- Classifications
- Check what kind of classifications have been done
- Go to different sets of sources and open classification sheets
- Queries pane
- Coding comparison: two persons code same content and Nvivo calculates similarity of coding. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT for validity / reliability of your study.
- Other queries are for exploring your nodes/data, but are for "advanced users" .. I have used queries to quantify my qualitative data. Check what kind of queries have been done in sample project
- Reports
- You can get coding summaries, node summaries etc. reports by using this dialog. Quite nice for getting an overview of your nodes etc.
- Sources pane (left side of the UI)